Clayton Hardiman: Real cost of disaster seen in survivors

Clayton HardimanIt’s more than a quarter-century later, and I’m still thinking about the day after “The Day After.” I’m thinking about a survivor who simply couldn’t stop talking about the thing she couldn’t talk about.

First, a short history lesson: Some of you may have read about “The Day After” even if you’re not old enough to remember it. A 1983 made-for-TV movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war, it was not so much a film as a happening. Its graphic depiction of what may have been our greatest fear provided fodder for water-cooler conversations for weeks on end. It provoked us, sobered us and may even have affected our foreign policy. Then-President Ronald Reagan drew a direct line of causality from the airing of the film in 1983 to the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty four years later.

In short, it scared the living daylights out of us.

And remember, all this was about a fictional nuclear holocaust. The day after it aired, I talked with a woman who had survived a real one.

At least, I tried to. But when I broached the subject, she called a halt to the conversation. She told me she just couldn’t talk about it.

You understand, she told me.

And I said I did, although strictly speaking that was a falsehood. Appreciate it? Yes. Respect it? Sure. But how could I understand it? I hadn’t seen what she had seen. I hadn’t even begun to endure what she had endured. How could anyone who wasn’t even alive on Aug. 6, 1945, let alone present and invested in Hiroshima, Japan, possibly understand?

But what moved me most was what happened next. She began to tell me about what happened in the brief instant when the bomb detonated and the eternity that followed. She told me a horrific tale of bodies incinerated, of family decimated, of weeks of scavenging, of months of watching for radiation poisoning, of days of watching the sky in panic, terrified that the same hell might descend again.

I was a complete stranger to her, and yet all this came out like some toxin she had been waiting years to expel. I have some appreciation of why it was impossible to talk about. It was almost impossible to listen to.

There is a kind of methodology, a catastrophic box score, that we use for measuring loss when disaster strikes. We estimate the loss of property and the damage to the infrastructure. We sum up the numbers of displaced and the dead. Usually, there is a stratospheric dollar figure, representing an estimate of what it will cost to set things right.

Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami have overwhelmed the world with its massive wave of casualties. Right now the grisly task of counting them goes on apace.

But some casualties are not easily counted or even recognized. Perhaps Japan has a deep-seated sense of this — as deeply rooted and hard earned as any nation on earth.

Hence the inevitable sense of recognition in the recent news stories describing the relief efforts of the Japanese Red Cross and the 2,400 nurses it has enlisted who are trained to provide post-disaster psychological support.

Yes, there is a mammoth tragedy in the number of lives lost. But there are also lives damaged and lives transformed forever. There are lives in which peace of mind is now an alien concept — and may be so for the indefinite future.

This is not to say it is a simple matter to treat the wounded and bury the dead. But some of the most profound wounds extend beyond the physical.

Remembering this, it’s hard not to think about the day after — and a survivor who couldn’t stop talking about what she couldn’t bring herself to say.